A variety of additional services are available to a user in connection with telephone service, including, for example, call waiting, call forwarding, caller ID, etc. These additional services are designed to enhance the user's telephone service, and to allow the user control over certain aspects of the telephone service.
Frequently, individuals with telephone service receive annoying or nuisance unsolicited calls, including from telemarketing businesses. Some features exist that permit users to subscribe through their telephone service provider and obtain information about the party placing an incoming call to the user. However, these services will not show caller identification data if the calling party has listed its number as private. Additionally, depending on the user's telephone service, calls placed from outside the user's local area will also frequently not display information regarding the calling party.
Additionally, features exist that permit users to specify that they want a telephone network to automatically block incoming calls from private numbers or from specific calling party numbers. However, these services either automatically block all private numbers (or numbers from out of area), or block no numbers. Additionally, services allowing the user to specify individual calling party numbers to be blocked require a user to call the telephone service provider, speak to a customer representative, and identify the number to be blocked. If the user does not have access to the number of the calling party that the user wishes to block, for example, if the calling party has a number listed as private, the user may not be able to identify to the telephone service the number to block.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that addresses these and other problems.